Service providers of wireless wide area networks, such as wireless telecommunication networks, commonly offer subscriptions (e.g., service contracts) to customers that access their networks in order to obtain voice, data or other services. A subscription might be for any length of time, such as a number of months or years. In one common arrangement, the customer pays a recurring monthly charge for a predetermined amount of access to the wireless wide area network. For example, the customer might pay a flat monthly charge and in return get a predetermined number of minutes of voice calls and/or a predetermined number of megabytes of data services each month. The customer might then pay additional charges for any usage over these predetermined amounts.
Alternative billing arrangements are also possible. For example, rather than paying a recurring monthly charge for a predetermined amount of access to the wireless wide area network, the customer might only pay for the customer's actual usage. That is, the customer might pay a per minute and/or per megabyte charge for the actual number the number of minutes of voice calls and/or number of megabytes of data services that the customer uses that month. Other billing arrangements are also possible. Additionally, the service provider might include special incentives in the customer's contract, such as free nights and weekends, free long distance or other such incentives.
Although the service provider might provide a variety of different services to a customer, the respective costs incurred by the service provider for providing these services might not be the same. For example, the costs incurred by a service provider for a call between two wireless devices on the wireless wide area network might be different than the costs the service provider incurs for a call between one wireless device on the wireless wide area network and a device on another network. Additionally, even different calls between wireless devices that are both on the wireless wide area network might have different associated costs depending on how the different calls are established and transported over the wireless wide area network. While the service provider may have a higher or lower cost associated with a particular call, those variations would not then be reflected in the amount actually charged to the customer.
Therefore, there exists a need to provide improved billing functions in a wireless wide area network.